Fickle Friends: How to Deal with Frenemies

HAVE YOU EVER had a friend who makes plans to hang out but cancels when a better offer comes along? Or a buddy who helped you through a bad breakup, then flirted with your ex? To scientists, these problematic pals are known as ambivalent friends. To a more slang-savvy crowd, they are called “frenemies.”

Either term has come to describe a range of complicated relationships—those that boost you up and bring you down, for any of a variety of reasons. They include the well-meaning friend who is overly competitive, the pal who is a pillar of support when times are tough but cannot quite take pleasure in your successes, and the college buddy who drops everything to lend you a hand when you need one but gossips about you later.

In these troublesome relationships, qualities such as warmth and understanding go hand-in-hand with criticism, jealousy or rejection. “It’s a friend who drives you nuts,” says Karen Fingerman, a psychologist at Purdue University. “You love them, you don’t want to lose them, but they’re really a pain.”

Researchers have only recently begun examining these mixed-emotion associations. So far they are finding that such ties have negative effects on mental and physical well-being, boosting blood pressure and risk of depression while lowering resistance to stress. But if you want to keep your frenemies—and most people do—you can minimize these effects by buffering your interactions with the mixed-weather friends and con­sidering impartial reasons for their hurtful behavior.

Quality over Quantity
Humans are an extremely social species, and a friendless existence has many drawbacks, including depression, hypertension and cognitive decline. But if you want to be happy (and by extension, healthy), having lots of friends is much less important than having good ones. In a 2006 study psychologists Meliksah Demir and Lesley Weitekamp, then both at Wayne State University, gave 423 college students questionnaires about their personality, their happiness level, and the quality and number of their friendships. The researchers defined quality friendships as those scoring high on help, intimacy, self-validation, reliable alliance, emotional security and stimulating companionship. Fifty-eight percent of the variance in happiness could be attributed to the quality of a person’s friendships, compared with 55 percent for personality. The number of friends, on the other hand, had no significant effect on how happy a subject was.

From this angle, frenemies are problematic. No friendship is perfect, of course. But frenemies are consistently imperfect, scoring low on factors such as reliable alliance and self-validation, for example. And once you develop ambivalent feelings for a person, “future in­teractions with that person may be judged through that lens,” says psychologist ­Julianne Holt-Lunstad of Brigham Young University. In other words, you are less able to overlook a thoughtless comment made by a frenemy than one made by someone you think of as supportive.

Our lives are riddled with frenemies. From surveys asking people to assess their relationships, Holt-Lunstad and University of Utah psychologist Bert Uchino have found that, on average, about half a person’s social network is made up of ambivalent ties. Many are in the family. Fingerman has found that people are likely to view spouses, parents, children and siblings with more ambivalence than friends and acquaintances. One reason: it is much harder to swap out a family member than a friend, no matter how troublesome he or she is. In addition, even irritating family members often provide support and warmth you cannot afford to give up.

Unhealthy Ties
Ambivalent relationships may do more than dishearten. In a study published in 2003 Holt-Lunstad and Uchino asked 102 male and female volunteers to wear blood pressure monitors for three days. Every time a subject had a social interaction lasting more than five minutes, he or she would describe it in a diary and rate the quality of that relationship. Not surprisingly, blood pressure readings were typically higher when individuals encountered ambivalent friends than when they saw supportive friends. But intriguingly, blood pressure was also more elevated in the presence of ambivalent friends than it was with people the subjects disliked but could not avoid (such as classmates or co-workers). You expect very little from someone you loathe, Holt-Lunstad surmises, whereas ambivalent friends, unpredictable as they are, often raise your hopes only to dash them. And that disappointment, or fear of it, can negatively affect your health.